Sean Guillory
About Sean
Sean Guillory is a historian of Russia/Soviet Union and a podcaster. In 2015, he started The Eurasian Knot (formerly, the SRB Podcast), a weekly podcast on Eurasian politics, culture, and history. He wrote, edited, and produced Teddy Goes to the USSR, his first audio documentary. It was nominated for an Ambies award for Best DIY Podcast in 2023. Sean has since embraced the art of audio narrative. He is currently working on The Reddest of the Blacks, a series about the life and fate of Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the only known American Black victim of Stalin's terror.
Sean works in the University of Pittsburgh's Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Center where he holds the undistinguished title of Digital Scholarship Curator. He's a Los Angeleno at heart and misses three things about the City of Angels: the Lakers, In-N-Out Burger, and the weather. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for reasons he's still trying to figure out.
Sean's Portfolio
Americans believed the Soviet Union was cut off from the West. Nothing went in. And very little came out. Yet, tens of thousands of Americans visited their Cold War rival annually. What did they find behind the Iron Curtain? Teddy Goes to the USSR, a new six-part podcast series follows one such American, Teddy Roe, to shine light on Soviet tourism, police surveillance, consumerism, race, and everyday life through his extraordinary three-month trip to the Soviet Union in 1968.
It’s Sunday, October 13, 1935, and someone, we don’t know who mails a letter from the outskirts of Moscow. It’s addressed: “Kremlin. To Comrade Stalin.” It arrives a few days later.
There was nothing odd about people writing Stalin. They wrote to him a lot. To plead for help. To give advice. To complain. To denounce. And to threaten.
The letters could be incredibly personal. And also incredibly irate. So many letters poured into Soviet officials, one historian called letter writing “a national pastime.”
So, when Comrade Sentaretskya, one of the secretaries sorting Stalin’s mail, got to this letter, she had no reason to worry . . . . that is until she opened it.
Experience
Skills
- Translation
- Story Editing
- Social Media
- Research